My Own Private Idaho (1991)

September 27, 1991

Reviews/Film Festival;
A Road Movie About Male Hustlers

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: September 27, 1991

With "My Own Private Idaho," his third feature, Gus Van Sant Jr. makes a big bold leap to join Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers in the front ranks of America's most innovative independent film makers.

"My Own Private Idaho" is essentially a road movie that, in its subversive way, almost qualifies as a romantic comedy except that its characters are so forlorn. The film itself is invigorating -- written, directed and acted with enormous insight and comic elan.

It will be presented at the New York Film Festival today at 9:15 P.M. and tomorrow at midnight and is scheduled to open its regular commercial engagement on Sunday.

Like Sam Shepard's plays, "My Own Private Idaho" is set in a contemporary American West inhabited by people who have lost touch with a past perhaps best left unexplored. Their attempts to connect with the present are tentative, desperate and usually doomed. For most, the cost of the connection is too high, being beyond their mental and emotional means.

"My Own Private Idaho" is about two very different male hustlers who cross paths on Portland, Ore.'s, skid row, become close friends for a while, then separate.

Mike Waters (River Phoenix) is a good-looking, none-too-bright young fellow, the product of a dramatically dysfunctional family, whose career opportunities are affected by his narcolepsy. Mike has a terrible tendency to fall asleep, suddenly and deeply, when faced with a situation in which he can't cope.

A very different sort is Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), who has the manners, self-assurance and handsomeness associated with an idealized preppie. He is an untroubled bisexual who operates according to a carefully planned agenda. Scott comes from a rich family and stands to inherit a fortune. His father is the Mayor of Portland.

He hustles not because he has to but to satisfy his ego, to infuriate his father and to make his own apparent salvation, when he comes into his money, just that much more dramatic. Scott is rigorous and a bit spooky in his resolve. His aim: to become a pillar of the community and maybe, some day, even mayor.

This is the frame of the movie, which Mr. Van Sant wrote and directed and which operates according to an agenda as carefully structured as Scott's, though never as baldly stated.

The movie opens on a stretch of two-lane blacktop highway somewhere in the vast lonely landscape of Idaho. Wearing a wool stocking cap and a wool jacket and carrying a small duffle bag, Mike Waters stands at the side of the road, at loose ends. Which way to go? As often happens at such times, Mike is overwhelmed by sleep.

The movie more or less wakes up in Seattle, where Mike is pliantly responding to a male customer. He's still without direction. There's another customer who asks him to act out an elaborate domestic fantasy. Mike docilely complies.

Moving on to Portland, he is picked up by a woman who takes him back to an imposing mansion in the suburbs. Mike: "Do you live here?" The woman: "Yes." Mike: "I don't blame you." This, however, is a somewhat different kind of job. There are already two other hustlers there. Something about the looks of the woman prompts Mike to drop into a heavy snooze again.

Though Mike and Scott have seen each other around, this is how they become pals. Scott carries the sleeping Mike out of the house, covers him with his own dark blue blazer and leaves him on the suburban lawn.

Back on skid row, they become something of a pair. Scott introduces Mike to an inner circle of skid row hustlers and their hangers-on. In particular, there is Bob Pigeon (William Richert), a big, fat, hard-drinking old drifter who has a fondness for young men but seldom the money to pay for them.

Bob talks grandly. Metaphors are his medium. Bob was once in love with Scott, and Scott used the older man as his teacher and protector in the demimonde. Mr. Van Sant is not subtle about it: Bob is Falstaff to Scott's Prince Hal. There is even an elaborate variation on Shakespeare's Gadshill caper, in which Falstaff becomes the butt of Hal's carefully orchestrated joke-robbery.

Mr. Van Sant's control is such that the movie accommodates the artifice of this allusion without embarrassment and, indeed, to its own profit. Of more immediate importance to the success of the film, though, is the odd relationship between Scott and the hapless Mike.

Scott, who has nothing better to do at the moment, agrees to help Mike search for his long-lost mother, last heard from somewhere in Idaho.

In the course of this journey, which begins on a stolen motorcyle and is the sad lost heart of the film, the two young men move from Portland to Idaho to Italy and back to Portland, though now going their separate ways.

Like the narcoleptic Mike, the movie initially seems to be without direction. It appears to drift from one casual encounter to the next, getting what it can from the passing connections, some of them very funny, others harrowing, until time runs out. When the film abruptly reaches its end, the conclusion is seen, in hindsight, to have been inevitable from the opening frame.

"My Own Private Idaho" is as blunt, uncompromising and nonjudgmental as Mr. Van Sant's two earlier films, "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Mala Noche," but the scope is now broader and the aspirations more daring.

Too much should not be made of the free use of Falstaff, Hal and the two "Henry IV" plays. It's a nervy thing to do, and it works as far as it goes. Mr. Van Sant's evocation of the world in which Mike and Scott briefly connect is what "My Own Private Idaho" is all about.

The movie, photographed by Eric Alan Edwards and John Campbell, has a beautiful autumnal look and a way of seeming to take its time without actually wasting it.

The performances, especially by the two young stars, are as surprising as they are sure. Mr. Phoenix ("Dogfight") and Mr. Reeves (of the two "Bill and Ted" comedies) are very fine in what may be the two best roles they'll find in years. Roles of this density, for young actors, do not come by that often.

Mr. Richert, best known as the director of the one-of-a-kind "Winter Kills" (1976), is not fat enough to be even a weight-conscious Falstaff, but he clearly enjoys acting.

At no point in the course of the film is mention made of AIDS. The omission is so marked that it must be deliberate. It's not enough to assume that all these guys practice safe-sex because Mike is once seen carrying a condom. It could be that Mr. Van Sant means the film to be a fable set in its own privileged time.

Whatever the explanation, AIDS simply does not exist in "My Own Private Idaho."